Ludwig Wittgenstein and G. W. F. Hegel, two figures not normally cited together, concur that the resurrection of Christ is the triumph of love, and has little to do with the miraculous. Focus on the miraculous aspect of the resurrection misses how resurrection is to be integrated into the life and identity of the crucified. Wittgenstein confides to his diary his struggle with the resurrection. He understands it is not simply a matter of believing another miracle, but a comprehensive shift in how the world is perceived – an alternative grammar in apprehending the world. “Just as ‘God’ does not pick out an agent or an individual among others, in the way a proper name does, so ‘resurrection’ does not pick out a specific event in chronicled history to set beside other events.”[1] Proof or evidence or even the factuality of the resurrection is not primary for Wittgenstein, but the shift in the global “reading” of facts entailing the founding of the church and living in faith. Belief in the resurrection is entry into an alternative world of understanding.
The Death and Resurrection as God’s Story
For Hegel also, the resurrection is not about the miraculous but is to be read as key to the story of God: “the full presence of both humanity and divinity, the despair that God himself is dead, and the reversal, the putting to death of death and the resurrection into life” is “a reenactment of the divine history.”[2] This history is Trinitarian in that the “abstractness of the Father is given up in the Son. But the negation of this negation is the unity of Father and Son—love, or the Spirit.”[3] In Christ a difference in God is realized, in that the distant abstract God is made concrete (in the world), such that he is immediately accessible (in Spirit and love). Through incarnation and death, human finitude is “transfigured into the highest love” as God is poured out and made available in human interiority. The resurrection and ascension are an extension of the incarnation, as in this “exaltation Christ has appeared for immediate consciousness in the mode of actuality.”[4] Hegel refers to the resurrection as making God available for “envisagement,” which he equates with the defeat of death (the negative) and the “preservation in death itself” of the “highest love.”[5]
In Hegel’s estimate this story of God in the history of the “teaching, life, death, and resurrection” makes the community of love, the church, a possibility. This goes beyond an intellectual foundation: “This is the crucial point on which everything depends, this is the verification, the absolute proof. This is what is to be understood as the witness of the Spirit.”[6] This is the history of the kenotic outpouring of the Holy Spirit in which the sensible presence is transfigured into his real presence through the Spirit.[7] In the “eternal repetition of the life passion and resurrection of Christ in the members of the church,” lies the creation and preservation of the world.[8] The world is incorporated into the story of God.
Jürgen Moltmann, like Hegel, reads the resurrection as the unfolding story of God: “The union of Jesus with God and of God with Jesus was constituted . . . by ‘the resurrection of Jesus’.”[9] The risen Christ is the truth of the historical Jesus and the truth of God, and this is captured in the earliest formulas of the New Testament: “Jesus Christ crucified and risen” (1 Co 15:3–5). His resurrection, joined to his life course, teachings, and death, serves as the foundation of Jesus’ identity as Son of God, Lord, or simply God, and is the cornerstone of his eschatological kingdom. Resurrection means his entire life is the founding of the eschatological kingdom, and there is no divide between the life of Christ and the founding of the Church. Luke-Acts, the Gospels and the history of the Church are to be read as a singular movement of God pouring out his life for the world.
Resurrection: The Interpretive Key to All Things
Along with Hegel and Wittgenstein, Moltmann recognized resurrection is not just a fortuitous miracle or another historical event. The resurrection is the end of history as previously understood: “it is not a question of establishing the life and death of Jesus as a historical fact, and regarding the resurrection, the appearances of Jesus and the Easter faith as inter-changeable interpretations of that fact. That would not do justice to the rise of the Christian faith at all.”[10] The resurrection is the interpretive key to understand the life of Christ through faith. The resurrection “does not speak the ‘language of facts’, but only the language of faith and hope, that is, the ‘language of promise.”[11] In this world the cross is foolishness and a scandal, and by the same token the resurrection cannot be “proven.” The cross and resurrection can only be grasped through faith as an alternative world-view.
In the Wittgensteinian sense, for Moltmann the resurrection is the deep grammar by which the meaning of Christ is to be read into all things. Referencing I Cor. 15:14 (“If Christ is not risen, then our preaching is vain and your faith is vain”) Moltmann notes, “If one calls the cross of Jesus the ‘nuclear fact’ of Christian faith, one must call his resurrection the primal datum of that faith.”[12] In the early Christian community, there was little dispute about the fact of the resurrection. The issue was how to interpret Christ’s death in light of the resurrection in which light record of his life was preserved. “As a merely historical person he would long have been forgotten, because his message had already been contradicted by his death on the cross. As a person at the heart of an eschatological faith and proclamation, on the other hand, he becomes a mystery and a question for every new age.”[13]
A Reinterpretation of God’s Righteousness
The Easter faith arose among those who fled the crucifixion, as God seemed to have abandoned Christ. However, where faith in Jesus was shattered at the cross, the resurrection expands faith to include a reconstitution of (Jewish) hope. No longer is righteousness on the basis of the law or Jewish eschatology. Jesus was a “lawless man,” a “rebel,” “abandoned by God” according to the law, but declared righteous by the resurrection. The Jewish apocalyptic says all should wait for the resurrection of the dead, but Easter faith is trust in Jesus resurrection from the dead.[14] “Between the eschatological Easter faith and the various forms of late-Jewish apocalyptic stood Jesus himself and his cross.”[15] The future and past of Judaism are made new in light of God’s identification with Christ. In the resurrection “God has identified himself, his judgment and his kingdom with the crucified Jesus, [with] his cross and his helplessness.”[16] God and life are found in the midst of death as the future kingdom of life is made possible: “namely reconciliation in the midst of strife, the law of grace in the midst of judgment, and creative love in the midst of legalism.”[17]
This is not faith that God will damn the unrighteous and save the righteous – a resurrection unto judgement. This is a different conception of God and righteousness – a trust in God’s righteousness. In the midst of suffering, evil, and death, God has made things right. “The Christian belief in the resurrection does not proclaim world-historical tendencies or anthropological hopes, but the nucleus of a new righteousness in a world where dead and living cry out for righteousness.”[18]
Reading the cross in light of the law makes of Christ’s death one more propitiating sacrifice, with the expiation or propitiation meeting the requirements of the law but the resurrection is the end of the law of just deserts, as executioner, betrayer, oppressor and oppressed alike are received into righteousness by grace. “God had answered the evil deed of men in crucifying Jesus in a glorious way by raising him from the dead (Acts 2.24).”[19] The resurrection read into the cross means all that have been delivered over to death due to unrighteousness will find life. “Through his suffering and death, the risen Christ brings righteousness and life to the unrighteous and the dying.”[20] His death on the cross makes the meaning of the resurrection evident for the unrighteous: as their representative in death provides new life in resurrection. There is passage from death to life for all who are subject to death.
Defeat of Death, Evil and Sin
His is “resurrection from the dead” and not a revivification, reanimation or temporary raising, as it directly counters death (with all of its connotations of sin and punishment). It is not life after death, as conceived in many religions, presuming the immortality of the soul or the transmigration of souls. There is an annihilation of death; not mere life after death. The harshness of the crucifixion is an exclamation that death is a reality, and there can be no peace between this reality (a life lived in light of death) and the reality of crucifixion and resurrection (death defeated by life). This is not on the order of the raising up of Lazarus who would die again, but Jesus is no longer controlled by death: “Christ being raised from the dead will never die again” (Rom. 6.9). “Resurrection means ‘life from the dead’ (Rom. 9.15), and is itself connected with the annihilation of the power of death.”[21] One sort of history ends – “evil, death, abandonment by God” with resurrection marking the beginning of the new world of the righteousness of God.”[22]
He is “the first fruits of them that are asleep,” “the “pioneer of life,” the “firstborn from the dead.” He is “Jesus Christ”: “Jesus” binds him to his past, and “Christ” binds him to his future.[23]
‘Easter’ was a prelude to, and a real anticipation of, God’s qualitatively new future and the new creation in the midst of the history of the world’s suffering. . . For the Easter hope shines not only forwards into the unknown newness of the history which it opens up, but also backwards over the graveyards of history, and in their midst first on the grave of a crucified man who appeared in that prelude.[24]
Through the resurrection the death of Christ becomes the defeat of death for the living and the dead: “For to this end has Christ died and come alive again, that he might be Lord of both dead and living” (Rom. 14.9). The resurrection does not relativize the cross (as a past event), but makes it the point of salvation, qualifying the crucified as Lord and Christ, filling the cross with the eschatological and saving significance of God defeating death in dying and being raised.
The Resurrection as Providing Theological Coherence
The resurrection is often tacked on to legal theories of atonement (e.g., a sign of sacrifice accepted), rather than integrating the resurrection into the life and death of Christ to form a theological coherence. The historical and the eschatological are separated, with Jesus life and death as one half of Jesus and the risen Christ as the other half.[25] His death, separated from his resurrection is a repudiation of what he said and did, but joined together the reality of the incarnation (God become man) is made complete and coherent: “his cross is understood in the light of his resurrection, his way to the cross in the light of the saving meaning of his cross, his words and miracles in the light of his Easter exaltation to be Lord.”[26]
Jesus is raised, which means not only that this single individual has overcome death but his life is extended to church and cosmos. As Rowan Williams puts it, “The life that lives in Jesus is the active source of all relations in the finite world; so it is natural that, in its human embodiment, it is creative of unrestricted relation in the human world – and indeed beyond, if we take seriously Paul’s meditations in Romans 8 on the dependence of the entire creation on the reconciling process that occurs in the death and resurrection of Jesus.”[27] The resurrection is not tacked on to history but is the transformative moment for history and the cosmos, as the indestructible life of God is activated from within history and the cosmos so as to become “all in all” (Col 3:11).
[1] Ludwig Wittgenstein, Culture and Value, ed. G. H. Von Wright in collaboration with Heikki Nyman, trans. Peter Winch, Oxford: Blackwell, 1980 (henceforth CV), 64. Cited in Rowan Williams, Christ the Heart of Creation (Bloomsbury Publishing. Kindle Edition) 218.
[2] G. W. F. Hegel, Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion: The Consummate Religion, trans. By R. F. Brown, P. C. Hodson and J. M. Stewart (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2007) 53.
[3] Ibid.
[4] Hegel, 131.
[5] Hegel, 131-2.
[6] Hegel, 145.
[7] Hegel, 149. As the editor notes, “For Hegel the resurrection of Jesus from the dead indeed entails an Aufhebung—an annulling of his sensible presence, yet a preservation of his real presence and its transfiguration into the modality of spirit.”
[8] Hegel, 152.
[9] Jürgen Moltmann, The Crucified God: The Cross of Christ as the Foundation and Criticism of Christian Theology (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1993) 161.
[10] Ibid.
[11] Moltmann, 173.
[12] Moltmann, 161.
[13] Moltmann, 162.
[14] Moltmann, 172.
[15] Moltmann, 166.
[16] Moltmann,169.
[17] Moltmann, 171.
[18] Moltmann, 177.
[19] Moltmann, 179.
[20] Moltmann, 185.
[21] Moltmann, 170.
[22]Moltmann, 169.
[23] Moltmann, 164.
[24] Moltmann, 163.
[25] Moltmann, 160.
[26] Ibid.
[27] Williams, 38.